Paul Egede

Who was Paul Egede?

Paul or Poul Hansen Egede was a Dano-Norwegian theologian, missionary, and scholar, principally concerned with the Lutheran mission among the Kalaallit people of the Greenland established by his father Hans in 1721.

Egede was born in Kabelvåg, a village in Vågan, Norway, on the southern shore of Austvågøy. He was the older son of the village minister Hans Egede and his wife Gertrud Rask. Hans became dedicated to the cause of restoring contact with and missionizing among the Norsemen of the lost Greenland colony, who were presumed to have remained Catholic following the Reformation. He parlayed support among Norwegian merchants and the Danish Mission College into the establishment of the Bergen Greenland Company, which equipped three ships which left Bergen in 1721. A few months later, the Egede family and about forty other colonists landed on the Island of Hope at the mouth of the fjord which houses today's Nuuk. Scurvy broke out and most returned home as quickly as possible, but the natives proved generally curious and helpful. No Norse survivors were found and Hans's company went bankrupt in 1727, but he and his family learned the local Inuit dialect and began a Christian mission among them.